Table of Contents

What is BeGraph?

BeGraph is a cloud computing application dedicated to the visualization and analysis of complex networks for business and science. A network is a data structure composed of N entities called nodes and L relationships among them called links. Networks are becoming popular in the field of data analysis and Big Data because they contain information that other data structures lack. Features like small world phenomena, event spreading and clustering based on communities are unique to networks, and there lays the potential of this data structure.

BeGraph allows you to load, store and share several networks in the cloud. Each network can be visualized and explored using a Web Browser, giving a general idea of its structure and topological properties. A set of metrics can be run on the network in our cloud machines, characterizing mathematically nodes and/or links.

Why use BeGraph?

Easy to Use

BeGraph is a very intuitive and easy to use tool. It is not necessary to be an expert in Graph Theory to use the application, you only need to know your data and be prepared to think differently as in conventional data analysis.

Its cloud architecture avoids many installation, configuration or hardware issues, so you can focus on your analysis work.

Advanced Visualization

Network visualization is a very important feature of BeGraph. Using our 3D tool you can explore your data, highlight features, represent the results of the metrics and, globally, get a better understanding of your network. It is highly configurable and powerful, being able to render hundreds of thousands of nodes and a few million links in conventional graphics cards.

Computing Capabilities

Configuring and running network metrics is one of the main functionalities of BeGraph. You do not need to know the details of the metrics because all of them have predefined default parameters that work with many networks. You just have to know what they mean and what they represent in your data.

Storage

BeGraph stores the network, together with any property or metric result in a fast access cloud database. All networks are stored in workspaces. The disk space available and the number of networks depend on the purchased license.

System Requirements

Since BeGraph is a cloud application, no high-performance hardware is needed to calculate the network metrics or layouts. On the other hand, the network visualization takes place in your local computer, so it must have high graphic capabilities to deal with large networks.

BeGraph is supported by the Chrome and Mozilla Firefox Web Browsers. Both browsers give similar results with small networks, but Chrome is sometimes not able to load bigger networks. For those cases we recommend the use of Firefox because it can load more data, but it may need some tuning. You must modify the field dom.max_script_running time in about:config changing it from 10 (default) to, say, 3600 (one hour). This allows Firefox to take its time to load the network, avoiding interruptions and annoying messages.

BeGraph requires WebGL 1.0 to run. Check if you have it available using WebGL report.

A mighty GPU is desirable for a nice visualization experience. We strongly discourage the use of GPU's integrated on the motherboard. A minimum quality dedicated hardware, like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 with 4GB of memory, provides the render power to visualize the networks allowed in the standard BeGraph licenses. But take into account that the visual performance not only depends on the network size, but also on its topology and spatial layout. In particular, networks without internal structure, like the Erdös-Rényi random model, are the hardest ones to visualize.